Isak Dinesen Quotes

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

Who likes surprises? Nobody I know likes surprises. But facts change on the ground.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

Every day and every scene, it's never the scene that you expect.

We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

Sometimes in life, random things can blind-side you.

Predictability is the cousin of death: I don't necessarily want people to see me coming. You know?

Most things in life come as a surprise.

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

The older I get, the more I'm surprised with life. Things don't end up the way you think they will.

Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.

You just can't get surprised when you get surprised, because weird stuff just comes over the transom all the time, and it's not necessarily anything that you've planned for or anticipated.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Life is always surprising to me. When you think it's going to get dull, it never really does.

Things we do not expect, happen more frequently than we wish.

Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well.

You just can't control your art in the future.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

I do not believe they've run out of surprises.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in - in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was - uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn't know it.